Just saw the J. J. Abrams "Star Trek" film and I have to say that I have almost no complaints, which is a sign of its amazing success in meeting two seemingly mutually exclusive objectives. It retained a good bit of the the spirit of The Original Series (TOS), yet was still an exciting ride with with great action and superb special effects. I have to admit that it's a bit weird to find no "cheese", a Star Trek film devoid of dragging scenes of overly intellectual … [Read more...]

Thanks to Haroon Moghul's untimely reminder, I'm am now compelled to spend a morning frenetically switching back and forth between a curiously unchanging screen of C# code in Visual Studio 2008 and a browser with a dozen panes opened to all manner of Star Trek news and lore. Deadlines and fatal errors be damned, this is Star Trek. [For the sake of Pete, someone needs to invent a bank-style panic button that instantly throws an innocuous scene of industry and exclusively … [Read more...]

Good news: We're one step closer to warp drives and photon torpedos. BBC NEWS | 'Cloaking device' idea proposed The cloaking devices that are used to render spacecraft invisible in Star Trek might just work in reality, two mathematicians have claimed.If I could have one imaginary technology from ST, it wouldn't be obvious ones. Not the cloaking device. It's not the transporter, either. Not the warp drive. Not the tricorder. Not even the phaser. Give … [Read more...]

Here's a entertaining and wide-ranging essay ("The Science of Consistency: On fictional universes and the fans who rationalize them" by Todd Seavey) by a sci-fi buff about the challenge of maintaining continuity in science fiction and how inevitable such mistakes are in a fictional creation of any scale. Shabana is periodically taken aback when I take great umbrage at some "minor" mistake on her part concerning the key narratives of sci-fi/fantasy--I'd share them, but they're … [Read more...]

Speaking of intertexual experiments with pop culture icons (see my previous post on "The Superfriends and multiculturalism"), some genres just aren't meant to be mixed. While sci-fi purists might find Star Trek intellectually and artistically wanting--let's face it, with the exception of the occasional allegory about contemporary affairs (e.g., the episodes that criticized America's involvement in the Vietnam war), most of STOS's plots were if truth be told formulaic and devoid … [Read more...]

Trekkies [*], rejoice! New TOS ("The Original Series", for the unitiated) episodes are being made by fans and are available for free download. It's called "Star Trek: New Voyages" [this is a site hosted by Wired; the real site loads painfully slowly, but it's worth the wait if you can do something else in the meantime], about which Wired saysThe original Star Trek set out on a five-year mission that network execs cut short in 1969. Now a new confederation of … [Read more...]